The Team

Ruth G Kane is a full professor, Director of Graduate Programs (anglophone sector) at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, and Director of the cross-faculty Center for Research with Educational and Community Services (CRECS) a bi-faculty research center that collaborates with educational, social service, and community sectors to improve the well-being of children, adolescents and adults, including those who are vulnerable or who have special needs. She is co-Director, with colleagues at U Ottawa and across other Universities and community groups, of the Réseau de Savoir sur l’Équité | Equity Knowledge Network  . She is co-principal investigator in a five-year study funded by a SSHRC insight grant, of how school boards, teachers, and students take up citizenship within urban schools that serve youth from indigenous and first-generation immigrant communities. Her most recent research takes her to the far north of Canada where she is working with Dr. Kathy Snow (University of Prince Edward Island) and Inuit from across Inuit Nunangat to examine the preparation and professional support of Inuit teachers, a project supported by an ArcticNet Research Grant.

Dr. Ng-A-Fook is a Professor of Curriculum Studies and Director of Indigenous Teacher Education at the University of Ottawa. He is the Past-President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE), the largest professional educational research association in Canada. His current research program seeks to understand how Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians can address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action both inside and outside the contexts of teacher education and the school curriculum. He has recently co-published the following edited collections: 1. Reconceptualizing Teacher Education Worldwide: A Canadian Contribution to a Global Challenge; 2. Oral History, Education, and Justice: Possibilities and Limitations for Redress and Reconciliation; 3. Hacking Education in a Digital Age: Teacher Education, Curriculum, and Literacies; 4. Oral History and Education: Theories, Dilemmas, and Practices; and 5. Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and Arts of the Possible in Education. These works have won several different prizes such as the Canadian Oral History Association Prize awarded to an outstanding example of oral history practice in 2018; and Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award in 2017. He is a proud husband and father who continues to benefit from the privileges of living on the unceeded and unsurrendered traditional territories of the Anishinaabe Algonquin people. In response, he is deeply committed to collaborating with Elders, community members, traditional knowledge keepers, school administrators, teachers, and students toward re-visioning our past, present, and future relations as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Anishinaabemowin, Anglophone, Francophone, and Allophone Canadian citizens.

Dr. Vidya Shah is an educator committed to issues of equity and justice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, York University and teaches in the Master of Leadership and Community Engagement program, the graduate program in Language, Culture and Teaching, and Initial Teacher Education Programs. She received her Doctorate in Educational Administration from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and her research explores the contributing factors to school district reform for equity. Vidya has worked in the Model Schools for Inner Cities Program in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and was a primary, junior and intermediate classroom teacher in the TDSB. She also writes curriculum focused on social justice issues and is actively involved in community initiatives. @VidyaShah

Mark Currie is a PhD Candidate and Teacher Educator in the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Award and focuses his research around public pedagogies, sociohistorical space, and enacting antiracisms. His doctoral examines how the Ontario Black History Society’s walking tour in downtown Toronto acts as an educational tool for engaging and (re)shaping sociohistorical spaces as antiracist geographies. His previous graduate research was an ethnographic study of the relationship between cultural identity and postcolonial education on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Currently, along with his work with RSEKN, he is the Education Steward for CUPE 2626, a member of the uOttawa Education Graduate Student Association’s Finance Committee, and the Graduate Student Representative for the Canadian History in Education Association (CHEA).